Sleeping Ideas and Unreliable Memories

Her guiding image comes from Jorge Luis Borges², the Argentine writer: "we are our memory… that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors."

Popova places Kurosawa's Rashomon in a line of thought that starts with Nietzsche. Nietzsche called truth "a movable host of metaphors, metonymies³, and anthropomorphisms," meaning human language polished and repeated until it feels solid. Nearly a century later, Kurosawa turned the same doubt into a film. Four witnesses describe a samurai's murder, each version is "equally believable," and the viewer is left with nothing firm to stand on.

As memory research grew in the late 20th century, the film's name stuck to the well-documented unreliability of eyewitnesses. That is the Rashomon effect⁴. Popova then widens it with one line: "we only exist, after all, as eyewitnesses of our own lives." On this view the problem is not limited to crime scenes. It applies to the way each of us knows our own past.

Popova traces all of this back to the brain's "neurophysiological infrastructure" for forming and losing memories. The scientific explanation itself sits in two embedded TED-Ed⁵ animated videos: one on the Rashomon effect, and one by biomedical scientist Catharine Young on how memories form. The text of the article doesn't summarise either of them. She also points to Oliver Sacks's writing on memory disorders, and to neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin's work on Henry Molaison, known as H.M.⁶, the patient who lost the ability to form new memories after brain surgery.

She argues that computing has made this dependence much deeper. Chips, routers and devices now control, process and spread the flow of information that modern life runs on. If they failed, food would stop moving, planes would be grounded and markets would stop trading. Hayles calls the result "cognitive assemblages²": systems where humans and machines share the work of thinking and deciding. In her view that is why we are already "post-human."

A Singularity³ without an endpoint

Kevin Kelly co-founded Wired and worked on the Whole Earth Catalog. He goes further and says "we are already in the Singularity." By this he means the merging of humans and machines is happening gradually, not at one dramatic moment. We are "living inside the event horizon⁴," so we will only see the full picture looking back. Kelly borrows the "adjacent possible⁵" from complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman: each new combination opens possibilities nobody could have predicted. So the Singularity never arrives as a fixed endpoint. In his words, it "is always near."

On consciousness, Hayles disagrees with the transhumanists. She says AI cannot become conscious because it has no "natural intelligence." That kind of intelligence came from millions of years of embodied creatures evolving to survive in their environments. The language that large language models learn from carries traces of that bodily experience, but the meaning does not carry over without the experience behind it. Gardels links this to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who traces emotion and self-awareness to homeostasis⁶, the body's constant work to keep itself alive. On this view, the danger is that AI gains power through "recursive self-improvement⁷," meaning AI systems improving their own design, with no lived experience to anchor that growth. Without that anchor, they lack the deep grounding that moral reasoning depends on.

Byrne roams widely. Some figures have only recently become well known. Vera Rubin's measurements of how galaxies rotate pointed to dark matter¹, invisible mass whose gravity holds galaxies together. Lynn Margulis argued that complex cells began as partnerships between simpler organisms. Other ideas are now so built into our picture of the world that their origins are forgotten. Marie Tharp's maps of the ocean floor helped establish plate tectonics². Peter Kropotkin argued that cooperation, which he called mutual aid³, drives evolution as much as competition does. Some ideas are practical (cement, perspective in painting, inoculation⁴). Some are artistic: Caravaggio, the painter Beauford Delaney, Melville, Bach. And lichen is there purely because it delights him.

Byrne's main explanation is that we trust whatever model of the world works "most of the time, or for the time being." Success makes our assumptions feel like facts until they fail. A second trap is what he calls the hubris of modernity⁵: the habit of treating history as a story that "all led to us." That makes the past look too primitive to hold ideas better than ours. What we notice when we look back, Byrne writes, "is determined by how we see ourselves at present."